Feeling Time

"Feeling Timeprovides its readers with an erudite and capacious look at the feelings that characterize duration and how duration reproduces feelings in ways that capture the ethos of modernity from the eighteenth century and beyond. Its readings are astute and striking. They ask us to reconsider the way felt time figures in a multitude of Enlightenment discourses. If you are interested in philosophical readings of the novel before Jane Austen, then read Feeling Time."—Studies in the Novel,

"In her elegant study, Amit Yahav argues that chronometry and chronology do not exhaust the novel’s ways of engaging with time. Rather, the eighteenth-century British novel explores the phenomenality of duration: the textured, variable, intensive experience of intervals of time. Yahav reveals at the heart of novels ranging from Robinson Crusoe to Sense and Sensibility this experience of duration through the senses and emotions...Yahav’s study provides fresh readings of well-known texts; it also opens up less familiar areas that are well worth exploring further."—Novel: A Forum on Fiction

"Yahav's book offers a compelling new perspective on how temporality can be read as "felt duration" in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy."—Eighteenth-Century Studies

"In Feeling Time, Yahav turns to the relationship between a sense of time and the experience of reading. Yahav’s central contention is that the idea of reading as a suspension of time comes not from the Romanticists, but from the earlier 18th-century novel of sensibility. Yahav reminds us that over 30 years ago Paul Ricoeur conceptualized narrative as mediating temporal experience, often as a way of understanding the representation of consciousness."—Los Angeles Review of Books

"In this innovative and ambitious book, Amit S. Yahav challenges some overly entrenched critical commonplaces about the Enlightenment roots of modernity while simultaneously elaborating new and compelling analyses of novels and aesthetic treatises that are the well-established mainstays of eighteenth-century literary studies."—Deidre Lynch, Harvard University